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The group left a history of documents, including financial statements and internal deliberations over policy decisions, online in a Google Group that was open to public view but was recently closed. Those documents provide a peek into the day-to-day planning and operation of a modern public affairs campaign, one that publicly presented itself as driven by grass-roots energy but largely relied on big donors and wealthy Wall Street types for funding.

Fix the Debt furnished nearly $200,000 in seed money to The Can Kicks Back in late 2012. The groups are part of a loose coalition of anti-debt organizations that sought to pressure House Republicans and President Barack Obama to come to a grand bargain on reducing the debt and dealing with long-term entitlements.

But with a grand bargain dead in the water, both groups have struggled of late. Fix the Debt is in the midst of an organizational transition, while The Can Kicks Back is facing questions about the group’s finances and future direction.

As of November, The Can Kicks Back was operating at a small loss. The group’s cash reserves were down to $70,000, with more than $75,000 in outstanding donor commitments, according to documents and emails. And the group’s co-founders and management team have expressed concern about its future.

According to emails, the group has no actual debt but only enough cash to last through April.

“Without someone/something else covering staff costs and without fundraising miracles like Stan or near-Stan happening consistently, I don’t know how we both sustain [an] organization and do meaningful things,” Nick Troiano, co-founder and communications director of the group, wrote in a November email.

Troiano was referring to a large donation by hedge fund manager Stan Druckenmiller. According to emails, Druckenmiller provided the group with a $250,000 check in June 2013. That single check accounted for nearly 40 percent of the group’s fundraising haul last year.

Not that the group hasn’t tried. According to emails, it also took meetings or made fundraising asks of former oil and gas executive T. Boone Pickens, aerospace magnate Norman R. Augustine and First Pacific CEO Bob Rodriguez, among others, since 2012.

The group has also approached Fix the Debt for additional financial resources and brainstormed a list of donors to be set up with that included former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, eBay CEO John Donahoe and others.

The Can Kicks Back denied this week that its financial state is precarious. “The Can Kicks Back is proud to be a voice for our generation on issues related to long-term debt, decreased investment and reckless spending. We have no debt nor do we operate beyond our own financial means. A qualification from cherry-picked internal email months old is hardly representative of TCKB’s current financial situation,” Executive Director Ryan Schoenike said. “We are grateful for the support we have received and have revised our outreach, digital, and fundraising plans in order to continue our work of increasing millennial turnout in 2014 and beyond.”

The group is organized as both a 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) nonprofit — meaning that donations are anonymous. It voluntarily chooses to publish donor names, but not amounts.

“There are a number of points here that are factually inaccurate, and we won’t comment on unsubstantiated claims,” Schoenike said, although the group declined to specify which items the statement was referring to.

Schoenike and Troiano founded the group with Michael Eisenstadt, Jake Parent and Brandon Aitchison, and all five serve as the organization’s steering committee.

Though nominally independent, The Can Kicks Back has always had a tenuous relationship with its partner groups, Fix the Debt and another nonprofit called Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Both Fix the Debt and The Can Kicks Back have struggled with the perception that they are “astroturf” advocacy groups that are acting as mouthpieces of Wall Street and corporate interests.